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This weekend, the NY Times reminded us why we miss Milton Friedman. It is the NY Times, so don’t expect too much.

… In the United States, the reconsideration of the Friedman doctrine came via the global financial crisis that has resulted from the collapse of American real estate. Many economists blame regulators for ignoring warning signs that banks and investors were growing reckless. One Friedman acolyte has taken the brunt of such criticisms — Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve.

But as America reaches for regulation to tame the markets, the keepers of the Friedman flame remain resolute that government is no solution.

“Friedman taught some fundamental long-run truths and he was adept and skilled and almost brilliant at getting them into the public domain,” said Allan H. Meltzer, an economist at Carnegie Mellon. “Now we’ve come into a crisis that has dampened enthusiasm for those policies, and we’re headed back into a period of more regulations that will do the same bad things as in the past.”

George Will puts the current economy in perspective.

During presidential elections, when candidates postulate this or that “crisis” for which each is the indispensable and sufficient cure, economic hypochondria is encouraged, so a sense of suffering is rampant. Recently the Wall Street Journal, like Joseph Conrad contemplating the Congo, surveyed today’s economic jungle and cried, “The horror! The horror!”

Declines in housing values and the stock market are causing some Americans to delay retirement. A Kansas City man had been eager to retire to Arizona but now, the Journal says, “figures he’ll stay put for another couple of years.” He is 59.

So, this is a facet of today’s hydra-headed “crisis” — the man must linger in the labor force until, say, 62. That is the earliest age at which a person can, and most recipients do, begin collecting Social Security.

The proportion of people aged 55 to 64 who are working rose 1.5 percentage points from April 2007 to February 2008, during which the percentage of working Americans older than 65 rose two-tenths of one percentage point. The Journal grimly reported, “The prospect of millions of grandparents toiling away in their golden years doesn’t square with the American dream.” …

John Fund writes on the inability of Congress to get jobs filled in DC.

During last month’s Bear Stearns financial crisis, the Federal Reserve was in the awkward position of having two empty seats on its seven-member Board of Governors. Two new nominees, along with a holdover member, have been awaiting Senate confirmation for a year. This was a problem because the votes of five governors were required to exercise the economic rescue clause that allowed the Fed to lend emergency funds. One governor was unavailable to vote, so a special rule had to be invoked for the Fed to act.

Back in 2000, then-Fed chairman Alan Greenspan warned the Senate that it must fulfill its duty to confirm nominees. Failure to do so, he said, “would effectively create a problem for us should a major financial crisis emerge.” That almost happened last month. But the vacancies remain.

The problem goes far beyond the Federal Reserve. Partisan politics has brought Washington a “Home Alone” government, in which more than 200 nominees for the judicial and executive branches are waiting for Senate confirmation. …

Bill Clinton was stupid some more. MoDo has the delicious details.

… In a mystifying burst of nuttiness, right in time for the Sunday talk shows, Bill twice dredged up Hillary’s rococo story about sniper fire in Bosnia.

He defended his wife on confusing her facts by confusing his facts — a disconcerting reminder about what climbing back on a presidency-built-for-two would be like.

“A lot of the way this whole campaign has been covered has amused me,” the unamused former president said Thursday night in Boonville, Ind.

He’s absolutely crazed, and not just because he feels that he never got the sort of incandescent press coverage that Obama gets — except maybe when he and Al Gore were on that bus, hailed as “Heartthrobs of the Heartland.” Bill is also crazed about the ineluctable fact that he isn’t Obama.

“He can’t compute that he’s not the new kid on the block,” said a former Clinton adviser. “It’s about his mortality — and immortality. He needs her to win because if she doesn’t become president, he goes down as a minor president. If she wins, it’s the Adamses and the Roosevelts and the Clintons.”

But he knows it’s going down the drain, and that Obama is the hot new thing and they’re the establishment retreads. …

Writer for the LA Times provides background for Bill Richardson’s Obama endorsement.

… There were some ham-fisted phone calls from Clinton backers, who questioned Richardson’s honor and suggested that the governor, who served in President Clinton’s Cabinet, owed Hillary Clinton his support. “That really ticked me off,” Richardson said.

Still, even as he moved from Clinton toward Obama — “the pursuit was pretty relentless on both sides” — Richardson wrestled with the question of loyalty. After 14 years in Congress and a measure of fame as an international troubleshooter, Richardson was named Clinton’s U.N. ambassador, then Energy secretary: “two important appointments,” Richardson said.

He finally concluded that he had settled his debt to the former president: He had worked for Clinton’s election in 1992, helped pass the North American Free Trade Agreement as part of his administration, stood by him during the Monica S. Lewinsky sex scandal, and rounded up votes to fight impeachment.

“I was loyal,” Richardson said during an extended conversation over breakfast this week at the governor’s mansion in Santa Fe. “But I don’t think that loyalty is transferable to his wife. . . . You don’t transfer loyalty to a dynasty.” …

Bill Kristol columns on Obama’s embarrassment.

… But Obama in San Francisco does no courtesy to his fellow Americans. Look at the other claims he makes about those small-town voters.

Obama ascribes their anti-trade sentiment to economic frustration — as if there are no respectable arguments against more free-trade agreements. This is particularly cynical, since he himself has been making those arguments, exploiting and fanning this sentiment that he decries. Aren’t we then entitled to assume Obama’s opposition to Nafta and the Colombian trade pact is merely cynical pandering to frustrated Americans?

Then there’s what Obama calls “anti-immigrant sentiment.” Has Obama done anything to address it? It was John McCain, not Obama, who took political risks to try to resolve the issue of illegal immigration by putting his weight behind an attempt at immigration reform.

Furthermore, some concerns about unchecked and unmonitored illegal immigration are surely legitimate. Obama voted in 2006 (to take just one example) for the Secure Fence Act, which was intended to control the Mexican border through various means, including hundreds of miles of border fence. Was Obama then just accommodating bigotry? …

Abe Greenwald in Contentions too.

The radiant charm; the verbal agility; the promise of change; the post-racial unity; the deferential press; and most importantly, the vagueness of character and intent that sustained the whole façade. These were the hallmarks of Barack Obama’s run for the Democratic nomination, and bit-by-bit, associate-by-associate, gaffe-by-gaffe, the junior senator from Illinois has given all of it back. The extraordinary bounty that had made his campaign a nearly unstoppable force of nature is gone.

With last Sunday’s revelation—that he looks at smalltown America and finds armed, hate-filled, irredentist religious zealots—the last piece of the Obama puzzle fell into place. He is not, it turns out, an agent of change; he is a walking checklist of modern liberal inanities. Big government: check. Crippling taxes: check. Arrogance: check. Identity divisiveness: check. Moral superiority: check. Softness on enemies: check. Shakiness on Israel: check. Questionable patriotism: check. …

Fascinating WaPo piece on gains in computer power.

MIT was so advanced in 1965 (the year I entered as a freshman) that it actually had a computer. Housed in its own building, it cost $11 million (in today’s dollars) and was shared by all students and faculty. Four decades later, the computer in your cellphone is a million times smaller, a million times less expensive and a thousand times more powerful. That’s a billion-fold increase in the amount of computation you can buy per dollar.

Yet as powerful as information technology is today, we will make another billion-fold increase in capability (for the same cost) over the next 25 years. That’s because information technology builds on itself — we are continually using the latest tools to create the next so they grow in capability at an exponential rate. This doesn’t just mean snazzier cellphones. It means that change will rock every aspect of our world. The exponential growth in computing speed will unlock a solution to global warming, unmask the secret to longer life and solve myriad other worldly conundrums. …

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Gerard Baker thinks the demonstrations against the Olympic flame have a refreshing time warp about them.

There’s a nostalgic quality to the angry demonstrations that have greeted the arrival of the Olympic flame in Europe and the United States this week.

For some time now the modern wisdom that has brought young malcontents on to the streets of London, Paris and San Francisco has held the US and its dependable ally Britain to be the root of all evil. Governments from Beijing to Caracas could trample their citizens into the ground and you wouldn’t fill a telephone box with people upset about it. But call for the heads of the warmongers Bush and Blair and a million pairs of brave feet would take to the streets to support you.

So it’s a quaint departure for those same crowds, albeit in much smaller numbers, to protest loudly against the actions of men for whom tyranny is a chosen method of governing rather than a silly label attached by adolescent-brained politicians.

The mêlées this week actually have real historical resonance, an echo of the Cold War. They are a reminder of the days when the Olympics were a battlefield in the great ideological struggle of the time. The US-led boycott of Moscow in 1980 and the Soviet Union’s retaliation in Los Angeles four years later were in the end no more than gestures, as meaningful as all the other Games of the era when the two superpowers fought for gold medals as keenly as they fought for the affections of Third World leaders.

The 2008 version of the battle is lower key but this little struggle is a mirror on the most important simple political fact of our times – the global struggle for supremacy between liberalism and its enemies. …

Mark Steyn has a look at the idiots we have let loose in our schools.

Is American public education a form of child abuse? The Washington Post’s Brigid Schulte reported this month on a student named Randy Castro, who attends school in Woodbridge, Va. Last November at recess he slapped a classmate on her bottom. The teacher took him to the principal. School officials wrote up an incident report and then called the police.

Randy Castro is in the first grade. But, at the ripe old age of 6, he’s been declared a sex offender by Potomac View Elementary School. He’s guilty of sexual harassment, and the incident report will remain on his record for the rest of his school days – and maybe beyond.

Maybe it’ll be one of those things that just keeps turning up on background checks forever and ever: Perhaps 34-year-old Randy Castro will apply for a job, and at his prospective employer’s computer up will pop his sexual-harasser status yet again. Or maybe he’ll be able to keep it hushed up until he’s 57 and runs for governor of Virginia, and suddenly his political career self-detonates when the sordid details of his Spitzeresque sexual pathologies are revealed.

But that’s what he is now: Randy Castro, sex offender. The title of the incident report spells out his crime: “Sexual Touching Against Student, Offensive.” The curiously placed comma might also be offensive were it not that school officials are having to spend so much of their energies grappling with the first-grade sexual-harassment epidemic they can no longer afford to waste time acquiring peripheral skills such as punctuation.

Randy Castro was not apprehended until he was 6, so who knows how long his reign of sexual terror lasted? …

Barack Obama has been caught dropping some “bon mots” you would have expected his spoiled wife to say. This seems bound to have a telling effect on his campaign. Many of our favorites have things to say. Roger Simon is first.

Excuse me for finding Barack Obama a disingenuous creep. The candidate has now been widely quoted as saying as per rural America: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” …

Power Line is next.

… Obama stands revealed as a bigot of the elite, high-minded variety. With respect to embittered anti-trade sentiment to which Obama refers, the bitterness is one to which he himself caters. …

… Barack Obama’s arrogance has been evident for some time, and it’s no shock, perhaps, to learn that he shares this bigoted opinion, common among urban liberals, of people who live in “small towns.” But to actually express it, in public, at a campaign event, is stunningly stupid. Nevertheless, Obama did it …

Contentions’ Jennifer Rubin.

… This raises several questions. First, is the Clinton campaign minimally competent so as to be able to make this into the quote for the next 10 days in Pennsylvania and convince voters there and elsewhere Obama is a sneering snob? Second, if that is these people’s reason for adopting an uninformed view on trade what is his explanation for embracing protectionism? Third, just how many religious voters and NRA members could there be in Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina, Kentucky and West Virginia? …

Victor Davis Hanson.

… So here we have the essential Obama, a walking paradox between the postmodern hip-Ivy-Leaguer who sneers at middle-class America’s supposed prejudices and parochialism, while at the same time courting an anti-Enlightenment, prejudicial demagogue like Jeremiah Wright. For free trade or anti-free trade? For 2nd-amendment rights or not? Post-religious or pious and fundamentalist? For public campaign financing or not? A uniter of various groups or someone who sees America in terms of “they”? Straight-talking or someone who evokes “context” to explain away the inexplicable?

Again, we will see more and more of these condescending statements of the Michelle Obama strain, more and more of Revs. Wright, Meeks, Lee and others peddlers of division like them, and more and more clues to a long hostility to Israel—in what will eventually become the most disastrous chapter in recent Democratic history.

And pundits keep wondering why Hillary won’t give up?

Mark Steyn.

… If you’re running as a glamorous blank slate on which people project their own utopian fantasies, you’ve got to be very careful not to give the game away – especially when the game turns out to be the usual clichéd elite disdain for the great unwashed. I mention in the current issue of NR how odd it is that Michelle Obama is in many ways more condescending on the stump than Teresa Heinz Kerry. Now her husband’s at it, too. As Ed Driscoll says:

Leave it to Obama to make John Kerry’s Brahmin hauteur seem earnestly goofy in retrospect. …

John Podhoretz.

… Obama’s astonishing sentence offers a syllogistic string of superciliousness: Gun ownership is equated with religious fanaticism, which is said to accompany hatred of the other in the form of opposition to  immigration and support for trade barriers. It drips with an attitude  so important to the spiritual well-being of the American liberal — the paternalistic attitude that says, “Oh, well, people only do thing differently from me because they are ignorant and superstitious and backward” — that it has survived and thrived  despite the suicidal impact it has had on the achievement of liberal political goals and aims. …

The Captain – Ed Morrissey.

… What makes this so breathtaking is the mindless, casual way in which Obama reveals his snobbishness and elitism. We saw hints of this from Michelle Obama, in her assertions about never being proud of her country until her husband ran for President. (Soren Dayton has more on this.) We had not seen it from Obama himself in such a blatant and unmistakable manner. The matter-of-fact style in which he spoke this shows the unthinking contempt he has for people he has never engaged — an acceptance of stereotypes without questioning them that shows his own bigotry, not to mention foolishness and poor judgment.

At times, we have remarked that Obama only really performs well with a script. Once he has to speak extemporaneously, not only does he fare worse as an orator, but he tends to get lost and make unforced errors. It’s hard to imagine one worse than this. It’s all the worse because it’s not a gaffe in the normal sense, but a revealing moment that shows how Obama really views Americans. With this statement, it’s not hard to understand why he sat in Jeremiah Wright’s church for 20 years and heard nothing that moved him to dissent. …

ChiTrib editors take a dim view of Carter’s trip to Hamas.

… Carter hasn’t said publicly why he may be going. Maybe the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize laureate is convinced he can turn Mashaal into a peacenik. He better talk fast: Hamas is undertaking the most significant military buildup in its history, according to recent reports.

Or maybe Carter can’t resist a public and obvious rebuke to the Bush administration’s policy of isolating and weakening Hamas.

Mashaal and his cronies are overseeing the descent of Gaza into further violence, misery and hopelessness, all because they can’t envision a Middle East where Palestinians and Israelis can live side by side in peace.

Can a Nobel be revoked?

Shorts from John Fund.

If you’re wondering where the current airline mess came from, WSJ Editors think it’s congress.

… After the Federal Aviation Administration fined Southwest Airlines more than $10 million last month for inspection lapses, Congress rounded up the usual scapegoats for some hearings. FAA officials told the House Transportation Committee that the Southwest situation was “an isolated problem, not a systematic one.” But James Oberstar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the panel, was unpersuaded.

“It’s clear we have a structural problem at the FAA,” declared Mr. Oberstar, to nationwide headlines. “I fear that complacency may have set in at the highest levels of FAA management, reflecting a pendulum swing away from vigorous enforcement of compliance, toward a carrier-favorable, cozy relationship.”

The regulators got the message and went into panic mode. As is wont with government bureaucracies like the FAA, it proceeded to swing the pendulum waaaay back in the other direction – and hasn’t stopped. An industry-wide “audit” commenced, and FAA inspectors set about finding something – anything – awry with an aircraft to show Mr. Oberstar and other Congressional overseers that the agency was up to the job of enforcing federal maintenance requirements to the letter. …

Volokh spots yet another problem with our ethanol foolishness.

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London Times’ Gerard Baker sees some irony in Petraeus visit to Senate.

Something quite strange happened in Washington today. Three US Senators took a day off from their usual working routine and showed up in the US Senate.

John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama swapped for a day the life of campaign flights across the country, adoring crowds in airport hangars and soft-focus interviews with television chat show hosts for a brief trip back to their regular place of work.

The man who forced the remaining US presidential candidates to make this sacrifice was General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Iraq, who was giving his long-awaited progress report on the war to two legislative committees. …

Marty Peretz shows us the UN’s latest slap at Israel.

WaPo editorial on the continued Dem assault on free trade.

THE YEAR 2008 may enter history as the time when the Democratic Party lost its way on trade. Already, the party’s presidential candidates have engaged in an unseemly contest to adopt the most protectionist posture, suggesting that, if elected, they might pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared her intention to change the procedural rules governing the proposed trade promotion agreement with Colombia. …

Roger Simon noticed some confusion at the NY Times over who supported free trade.

Sometimes I think the NYT is a secret comedy act and I am missing the joke, their bias is so extreme. Take a look at today’s editorial “Some Truth About Trade” in which the solons at the Times urge Obama and Clinton to stop pandering on trade protection. Of course, the NYT seems to be blaming Rove for what the Democrats are doing. But never mind that. It’s a reflex. …

Daniel Henninger writes on the airline bomb plot unfolding in a courtroom in London.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain brought their presidential campaigns to the Petraeus-Crocker hearings on Iraq this week. An Iraq-based reporter appearing on one of the cable networks in the evening said the hearings struck him as oddly decoupled from the daily reality of war for the Iraqi people and U.S. troops there. Yup, never hurts to pinch yourself hard on entering presidential campaign space right now.

The three candidates addressed Gen. David Petraeus in tones of high gravitas equal to the thin altitude of the American presidency. Sen. Obama colloquied with Gen. Petraeus about the status of al Qaeda in Iraq – asking whether the terrorist organization could “reconstitute itself” and said that he was looking for “an endpoint.”

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Here’s another hypothetical: Would this conversation be different today if in August 2006 seven airliners had taken off from Terminal 3 at Heathrow Airport, bound for the U.S. and Canada and each carrying about 250 passengers, and then blew up over the Atlantic Ocean?

It is a hypothetical because, instead of the explosions, British prosecutors this week presented their case against eight Muslim men arrested in August 2006 and charged with conspiring to board and blow up those planes. …

We haven’t heard from the Captain for awhile. Here’s three posts from Hot Air.

In June 2004, Hillary Clinton outlined the statist philosophy in a speech to a San Francisco audience when she explained that “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” In 2008, that task has fallen to Michelle Obama. In an appearance in Charlotte yesterday, Mrs. Obama made it just a little more specific (via Instapundit):

Should she become first lady, she said she’d focus on family issues.

“If we don’t wake up as a nation with a new kind of leadership…for how we want this country to work, then we won’t get universal health care,” she said.

“The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”

This statement should make clear exactly what either Democrat represents. Both Hillary and Obama want to extend the power of the federal government over choices that have nothing to do with their Constitutional mandate. Both want to spend more money and expand systems that already fail to operate efficiently and deliver on their promises. And both want Americans across the board to give up more of their income to pay for bigger bureaucracies.

Neither of these candidates are moderate, center-left politicians. They’re both statists, and they both make the same basic mistake of all statists. ..

Thomas Sowell advises how the GOP might appeal to blacks.

… A sober presentation of the facts– “straight talk,” if you will– gives Senator McCain and Republicans their best shot at a larger share of the votes of blacks. There is plenty to talk straight about, including all the things that the Democrats are committed to that work to the disadvantage of blacks, beginning with Democrats’ adamant support of teachers’ unions in their opposition to parental choice through vouchers.

The teachers’ unions are just one of the sacred cow constituencies of the Democratic Party whose agendas are very harmful to blacks.

Black voters also need to be told about the tens of thousands of blacks who have been forced out of a number of liberal Democratic California counties by skyrocketing housing prices, brought on by Democratic environmentalists’ severe restrictions on the building of homes or apartments.

The black population of San Francisco, for example, has been cut in half since 1970– and San Francisco is the very model of a community of liberal Democrats, including green zealots who are heedless of the consequences of their actions on others. …

Speaking of Dem payoffs to teachers, dig this NY Post editorial.

Diane Gordon, the Brooklyn assembly woman convicted Tuesday of bribe- taking, must be wondering why she’s facing 10 years in the slammer – while Speaker Shelly Silver, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno and their respective henchmen are not.

It’s a good question.

After all, what lawmakers did this week in barring the use of student test scores in teacher tenure decisions was every bit as much a commercial transaction – a bribe deal – as what Gordon had planned.

Lawmakers OK’d the new rule, which handcuffs school districts and virtually guarantees even lousy teachers lifetime job security, for one reason only: The teachers unions paid them – outright – to do so, by shipping them boatloads of “campaign donations” over the decades.

Schoolkids? Never on the radar.

Indeed, no one even bothered to argue that the bill would help students. The sole question was whether the legislators would stay bought.

And the answer was easy: Yep. …

Victor Davis Hanson wonders where all the liberals have gone.

These days Democrats are not sounding very liberal. Classic liberals, after all, would support free markets, internationalism and the universal desire for constitutional government, while downplaying racial affinity. But the following examples highlight how far from these ideals today’s liberals are. …

CNN.Money reports on life in Canada’s oil boomtown.

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Joe Klein had unkind things to say about Peter Wehner. So, Wehner started quoting Klein. Turns out that was unkind.

… On February 22, 2003, he told Tim Russert on his CNBC program that the war was a “really tough decision” but that he, Klein, thought it was probably “the right decision at this point.” Klein then offered several reasons for his judgment: Saddam’s defiance of 17 U.N. resolutions over a dozen years; Klein’s firm conviction that Saddam was hiding WMD; and the need to send that message that if we didn’t enforce the latest U.N. resolution, it “empowers every would-be Saddam out there and every would-be terrorist out there.”

Earlier this year Klein called the Iraq war the “stupidest foreign policy decision ever made by an American President.” This raises a question: does Klein’s statements to Russert qualify as the stupidest endorsement of the stupidest foreign policy decision ever made by an American President? One difference between President and Klein is that the President didn’t pretend, as Klein has, that he was against the war after he was for the war. Another difference is that the President favored the surge, which Klein opposed. On January 8, 2007, for example, Klein wrote this:

I’m afraid I’m going to get cranky about this: The Democrats who oppose the so-called “surge” are right. But they have to be careful not to sound like ill-informed dilettantes when talking about it.

And on April 5, 2007 Klein wrote this:

Never was Bush’s adolescent petulance more obvious than in his decision to ignore the Baker-Hamilton report and move in the exact opposite direction: adding troops and employing counterinsurgency tactics inappropriate to the situation on the ground. “There was no way he was going to accept [its findings] once the press began to portray the report as Daddy’s friends coming to the rescue,” a member of the Baker-Hamilton commission told me. As with Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the decision to surge was made unilaterally, without adequate respect for history or military doctrine.

Klein, then, favored going to war with Iraq and was a critic of the strategy that has been succeeding and may actually help bring about a decent outcome in Iraq. All of which makes Klein’s effort to portray himself as an expert on and prescient about Iraq not terribly convincing. …

Mark Steyn on Mrs. Obama’s America.

… Her “adult lifetime” has been spent in some of the most unrepresentative quarters of American life: Princeton, the ever-metastasizing bureaucracy of diversity enforcement, and Jeremiah Wright’s neo-segregationist ghetto of Afrocentric liberation theology and conspiracy theory. If young people were to follow the Obamas’ message and abandon “corporate America” for the above precincts, the nation would collapse. Michelle Obama embodies a peculiar mix of privilege and victimology, which is not where most Americans live. On the other hand, it does make her a terrific Oprah guest: Unlike her sonorous, dignified, restrained husband, she has exactly the combination of wealth and vulnerability prized by connoisseurs of daytime talk shows.

There’s something pitiful about a political culture that has no use for Mitt Romney, a hugely successful businessman, but venerates a woman who gets more than 300 grand for running a “neighborhood outreach” and “staff diversity” program. They seem curious career choices for the closest confidante of a man who claims to be running as a “post-racial” candidate. Which Barack Obama certainly could have been: He’s no tired old race-baiter making a lucrative career out of grievance-mongering, like Jesse Jackson, President-for-Life of the Republic of Himself. In many ways, he’s similar to Colin Powell, a bipartisan figure born to a British subject (in Powell’s case, from the Caribbean; in Obama’s, from colonial Kenya) and thus untinged by the bitterness of the African-American experience. And yet the two most important figures in Obama’s adult life exemplify all the tired obsessions he was supposed to transcend. …

John Fund with a short on Condi Rice as VP.

Camille Paglia likes a question she gets about Hillary.

Corner post with good economic and politcal comparison.

John Stossel continues his knock on abuse by lawyers.

“We cannot use force.”

That was my response last week when a lawyer shouted at me, “You media types are bullies, too!”

We were arguing about my Wall Street Journal op-ed that called class-action and securities lawyers bullies and parasites who enrich themselves through extortion. It’s legal extortion, but extortion nonetheless.

These aggressive lawyers and their Naderite defenders don’t get it. Or they pretend they don’t.

There are only two ways to do things in life: voluntarily or forced. We reporters may be obnoxious, intrusive, stupid, rude, etc., but we cannot force anyone to do anything. All our work is in the voluntary sector.

But litigation is force. When a plaintiff sues, a defendant is forced to mount a defense. If he settles or loses, he’s forced to pay. Government is the enforcer. …

Weekly Standard says the polar bears wil be able to bear it.

… Lindzen flatly describes worry over polar bears as “gibberish.” “Polar bears are going up in number,” he says. “They’re not worried; they can swim a hundred kilometers.” The notion of threatened polar bear populations was recently challenged by J. Scott Armstrong, a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. In an article for the journal Interfaces, Armstrong and his coauthors argued that a series of complex and “erroneous assumptions” undergird much of the research showing polar bears at risk, and they offer compelling evidence that the animals have survived far warmer conditions in the past.

Still there is a push to have the polar bear officially listed as a “threatened species.” Hugh Hewitt, who practices natural resources law in addition to hosting a radio show, explained in a recent column that the move would clear a path for environmentalists to “argue that every federal permit that allows directly or indirectly for increased emissions of hydrocarbons is a federal act that might impact the polar bear.” Such permits would thus be subject to a new range of environmental regulations affecting all manner of industry.

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It takes a Canadian paper, The National Post, to point out an important Katrina lesson.

Shortly before Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, the chief executive officer of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott, gathered his subordinates and ordered a memorandum sent to every single regional and store manager in the imperiled area. His words were not especially exalted, but they ought to be mounted and framed on the wall of every chain retailer — and remembered as American business’s answer to the pre-battle oratory of George S. Patton or Henry V.

“A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level,” was Scott’s message to his people. “Make the best decision that you can with the information that’s available to you at the time, and above all, do the right thing.”

This extraordinary delegation of authority — essentially promising unlimited support for the decision-making of employees who were earning, in many cases, less than $100,000 a year — saved countless lives in the ensuing chaos. The results are recounted in a new paper on the disaster written by Steven Horwitz, an Austrian-school economist at St. Lawrence University in New York. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency fumbled about, doing almost as much to prevent essential supplies from reaching Louisiana and Mississippi as it could to facilitate it, Wal-Mart managers performed feats of heroism. In Kenner, La., an employee crashed a forklift through a warehouse door to get water for a nursing home. A Marrero, La., store served as a barracks for cops whose homes had been submerged. In Waveland, Miss., an assistant manager who could not reach her superiors had a bulldozer driven through the store to retrieve disaster necessities for community use, and broke into a locked pharmacy closet to obtain medicine for the local hospital. …

Daniel Henninger reminds that Viet Nam is one of the roots of today’s anti-war ideas.

Is it uncharitable to suggest that when the fighting erupted in Basra last week between Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the U.S.-trained Iraqi army, some opponents of the war hoped it would become George Bush’s Tet Offensive? That is, a battle whose military details are largely irrelevant, but whose sudden violence “proves” to voters that a U.S. military commitment is unwinnable and should be abandoned?

It was hard not to miss the antiwar spin coming off reports of the fighting, after a year of unmistakable gains from the Petraeus surge strategy.

An Obama foreign policy adviser, Denis McDonough, said it “does raise a handful of concerns as it relates to the surge and, more importantly, about the prospect of political reconciliation.” The New York Times noted that Hillary Clinton, campaigning in Pennsylvania, said the Bush commitment to keeping up troop levels in Iraq is a “clear admission that the surge has failed to accomplish its goals.”

The Democrats appear so invested in a failure that a half-week of violence erases a year of progress. What is the source of such instincts?

Walter Cronkite’s Feb 17, 1968 broadcast about the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive concluded with words that remain famous even now: “[I]t is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” Attend an Obama or Hillary rally and the message in those 40-year-old words echoes loudly, and are cheered again. …

Victor Davis Hanson provides a good overview of the campaign so far.

2008 was supposed to have been an ideal year for the Democratic Party. There’s an unpopular, lame-duck Republican president presiding over an iffy economy and an unpopular war. Plus, the Democrats won big in the 2006 elections, and there’s no Republican vice president in the race to draw on the power of incumbency.

No wonder that for much of 2007, the polls suggested that the only mystery would be by how much Sen. Hillary Clinton would beat former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the general election.

Indeed, for Democrats not to walk into the presidency in November 2008, the conventional wisdom was that the absolute unthinkable would have to transpire.

And now it almost has.

The Republicans have done something unimaginable in making Sen. John McCain the presumptive nominee. And so have the Democrats in allowing their primary season to drag on. …

Great analysis by Michael Barone of the Academic/Jacksonian split exemplified by the Clinton/Obama struggle. This was very long. The detailed state by state paragraphs have been deleted. A link to the whole piece is provided at the deletion.

… When I first noticed Obama’s weak showings among Appalachians, I chalked them up, as many in the press will be inclined to do, to an antipathy to blacks. But that simply doesn’t hold up. Go back to 1995, and look at the polls that showed that most Americans would support Colin Powell for president. I don’t think you’ll find any evidence of resistance by Jacksonian voters to the Powell candidacy. Rather the contrary, I suspect. He was a warrior, after all, and always exudes a sense of command. Or go back and look at the election returns in 1989 in which Douglas Wilder became the first black governor in our history, in Virginia. Jacksonians in southwest Virginia showed no aversion to Wilder; rather the contrary. Take Buchanan County, which runs along both West Virginia and Kentucky, and which voted 90 percent to 9 percent for Clinton over Obama on February 12. In 1989, it voted 59 percent to 41 percent for Wilder over Republican Marshall Coleman. Overall, Wilder lost what is now the Ninth Congressional District (long known as the Fighting Ninth) by a 53 percent-to-47 percent margin. But that is far less than the 59 percent-to-39 percent margin by which George W. Bush beat John Kerry in the district in November 2004 or the 65 percent-to-33 percent margin by which Clinton beat Obama there in February 2008. Jacksonians may reject certain kinds of candidates, but not because they’re black. A black candidate who will join them in fighting against attacks on their family or their country is all right with them.

Of course, the real Jacksonian in this race is John McCain. He is descended from Scots-Irish fighters who settled in Carroll County, Miss. Former Sen. Trent Lott, who once worked as a fundraiser for the University of Mississippi and therefore knew the folkways of elite types in his state very well, once told me that he had relatives who had known McCain’s relatives in Mississippi. “They were fighters,” he said, as best I can remember his words. “They would never stop fighting you. Those people would never stop fighting.” Obama gives the impression, through his demeanor and through his statements on Iraq, that he would never start fighting. …

Fascinating book reviewed by American.com.

How’s this for a crazy idea: a guy moves to a randomly selected city with $25 and plans to have a place to live, a car, and $2,500 in the bank—all within one year. Adam Shepard performed this exact feat and then wrote a book about it, titled Scratch Beginnings (SB Press, 240 pp, $13.95). According to Shepard, his experience proves that the American dream can come true.

In college, Shepard read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, which argues that only government intervention can rescue the working poor from what Ehrenreich portrays as a desperate plight. Shepard doubted her thesis and wanted to test it. So after graduating, he went to Charleston, South Carolina, with a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, $25, and a made-up tale of woe. He spent the first two months in a homeless shelter while he worked as a day laborer. He later found a permanent position with a moving company, which gave him a stable income. This allowed Shepard to buy a (very) used pickup truck, rent and furnish an apartment with a coworker, and start saving.

During this time, he was on a strict budget, buying clothes at Goodwill and lunching on peanut butter crackers and Vienna sausages. After ten months, he left Charleston due to an illness in his family. By that point, he had saved over $5,000. Along the way, he had met dozens of marginal citizens whose lives he found relentlessly fascinating.

Self-published earlier this year, Scratch Beginnings quickly climbed the charts on Amazon.com. Besides being a compelling story, it is a breezy read. …

Robert Samuelson on how not to save housing. He examines the proposal most often touted today and shows why, yet again, government stupidity will probably make the problem worse.

… The justification is to prevent an uncontrolled collapse of home prices that would inflict more losses on lenders — aggravating the “credit crunch” — and postpone a revival in home buying and building. This gets the economics backward. From 2000 to 2006, home prices rose 50 percent or more by various measures. Housing affordability deteriorated, with home buying sustained only by a parallel deterioration of lending standards. With credit standards now tightened, home prices should fall to bring buyers back into the market and to reassure lenders that they’re not lending on inflated properties. …

The Economist says scientists who study stools have pushed back the time humans first arrived in the Americas. No Sh-t!

A GOOD doctor can tell a lot from a stool sample, but Dr Thomas Gilbert can tell more than many. Indeed, he thinks he can tell when a continent was first populated, and by whom, for the stools he is examining were produced by some of North America’s earliest inhabitants.

Dr Gilbert, who works at Copenhagen University, in Denmark, is one of the leaders of a team that has just published its findings in Science. The team had examined 14 coprolites, as fossil faeces are termed by polite scientists. These coprolites came from a complex of caves in Oregon. Radiocarbon dating showed some of them to be more than 14,000 years old. And they appeared to be human.

The reason that excites researchers is that it helps to push back the date when humanity arrived in the Americas. …

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Claudia Rosett finds an award North Korea can win.

… Consider: If anyone is giving out Earth Hour awards worldwide, the obvious winner would be Kim Jong Il, who has created in North Korea a realm in which every day is Earth Day (see photo above). Whatever the genuine perils, when it comes to saving the planet — or more to the point, the human race — the better bets are the inventors who are not afraid to light the lamps and burn the midnight oil.

Contentions posts on the third Medal of Honor awarded for combat in Iraq.

John Lott has the goods on the media working to create GOP recessions.

During the 2000 election, with Bill Clinton as president, the economy was viewed through rose-colored glasses. According to polls, voters didn’t realize that the country was in a recession. Although the economy started shrinking in July 2000, most Americans through the entire year thought that the economy was fine.

But over the last half-year, the media and politicians have said we were in a recession even while the economy was still growing.

Gas prices are going up. The economy is slowing. Talk of recession is seemingly everywhere. While the majority of people rate their personal finances positively, consumer confidence in the economy has plunged to a 16-year low, well below what it was during the last year of the Clinton administration when we were in a recession.

A Nexis search on news stories during the three-month period from July 2000 through September 2000 using the keywords “economy recession US” produces 1,388. By contrast, the same search over just the last month finds 3,166. Or, even more telling, take the three months from July through September last year, when the GDP was growing at a phenomenal 4.9 percent. The same type of Google search shows 2,475 news stories. …

John Stossel covers California’s home schooling debate.

The cat is finally out of the bag. A California appellate court, ruling that parents have no constitutional right to homeschool their children, pinned its decision on this ominous quotation from a 47-year-old case, “A primary purpose of the educational system is to train schoolchildren in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare.”

There you have it; a primary purpose of government schools is to train schoolchildren “in loyalty to the state.” Somehow that protects “the public welfare” more than allowing parents to homeschool their children, even though homeschooled kids routinely outperform government-schooled kids academically. In 2006, homeschooled students had an average ACT composite score of 22.4. The national average was 21.1.

Justice H. Walter Croskey said, “California courts have held that under provisions in the Education Code, parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children,” Justice Croskey said.

If that is the law in California, then Charles Dickens’s Mr. Bumble is right: “the law is a ass, a idiot.” …

Thomas Sowell illuminates the irony in the Bear Stearns bailout.

There was a real irony in the recent intervention by the Federal Reserve System to provide the money that enabled the firm of JPMorgan Chase to buy Bear Stearns before it went bankrupt. The point was to try to prevent a domino effect of panic in the financial markets that could lead to a downturn in the economy.

The irony is that it was almost exactly a hundred years ago — 1907, to be exact — that the original J.P. Morgan arranged a bailout of a troubled financial institution for the same purpose of preventing a panic that could end up with the whole economy declining.

The difference is that J.P. Morgan and his fellow bankers used their own money, while the Federal Reserve System used their power to create money.

What that means is that the value of your money and my money — all Federal Reserve Notes — goes down when more Federal Reserve Notes are issued to subsidize the purchase of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase.

It wasn’t really a bailout because the stockholders of Bear Stearns lost their shirts. But the firm of JPMorgan Chase got money from the government to seal the deal.

In other words, we all paid to keep Bear Stearns out of bankruptcy, whether we all realize it or not. Whether that was better than the alternative is a separate question — and one whose answer may never be known. …

Time Magazine does a major piece on clean energy scam of ethanol.

… Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they’re serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol–ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter–in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil’s filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group. Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class.

But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it’s dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.

Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.’s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn’t exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.

Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon. …

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Christopher Hitchens remembers more about Bosnia in Tuzla Tall Tales.

… Yet this is only to underline the YouTube version of events and the farcical or stupid or Howard Wolfson (take your pick) aspects of the story. But here is the historical rather than personal aspect, which is what you should keep your eye on. Note the date of Sen. Clinton’s visit to Tuzla. She went there in March 1996. By that time, the critical and tragic phase of the Bosnia war was effectively over, as was the greater part of her husband’s first term. What had happened in the interim? In particular, what had happened to the 1992 promise, four years earlier, that genocide in Bosnia would be opposed by a Clinton administration?

In the event, President Bill Clinton had not found it convenient to keep this promise. Let me quote from Sally Bedell Smith’s admirable book on the happy couple, For Love of Politics:

Taking the advice of Al Gore and National Security Advisor Tony Lake, Bill agreed to a proposal to bomb Serbian military positions while helping the Muslims acquire weapons to defend themselves—the fulfillment of a pledge he had made during the 1992 campaign. But instead of pushing European leaders, he directed Secretary of State Warren Christopher merely to consult with them. When they balked at the plan, Bill quickly retreated, creating a “perception of drift.” The key factor in Bill’s policy reversal was Hillary, who was said to have “deep misgivings” and viewed the situation as “a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform.” The United States took no further action in Bosnia, and the “ethnic cleansing” by the Serbs was to continue for four more years, resulting in the deaths of more than 250,000 people.

I can personally witness to the truth of this, too. I can remember, first, one of the Clintons’ closest personal advisers—Sidney Blumenthal—referring with acid contempt to Warren Christopher as “a blend of Pontius Pilate with Ichabod Crane.” I can remember, second, a meeting with Clinton’s then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin at the British Embassy. When I challenged him on the sellout of the Bosnians, he drew me aside and told me that he had asked the White House for permission to land his own plane at Sarajevo airport, if only as a gesture of reassurance that the United States had not forgotten its commitments. The response from the happy couple was unambiguous: He was to do no such thing, lest it distract attention from the first lady’s health care “initiative.” …

The Captain says the Bosnian girl from Hillary’s adventure has surfaced.

Gabriel Schoenfeld writes on the real intelligence failure of W’s administration.

… In 2004, Congress radically reshuffled U.S. intelligence, creating a new intelligence “czar” — the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) — whose office, the ODNI, would assume many of the coordinating functions that had formerly been in the hands of the CIA.

This shift was intensely controversial. One of the most frequent criticisms was that grafting a new bureaucracy on top of an already dysfunctional system would only compound existing problems. Four years later, how is the ODNI faring?

As with any secret agency, we do not know what we do not know about the achievements of the ODNI. Its greatest successes may be hidden from view, and the fact that the United States has not been hit by a second Sept. 11 might well be credited to its efforts. By the same token, we do not know all of its failures, although some dramatic ones have already come into sight.

The most significant of these is the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of last November, which stated flatly in the first sentence of its declassified summary that Iran had halted its nuclear-weapons program. This was deeply misleading. As the NIE summary acknowledged only in a footnote, the most important element of that program — uranium enrichment — was proceeding at full tilt. In February, Mike McConnell, the current DNI, disavowed the document, acknowledging that it should have been handled differently. But by that time the damage to America’s Iran policy — and to the ODNI’s own credibility — had already been done. …

So, you wondered, how is Mark Steyn doing in his “Human Rights Commission” trial in Canada? The answer comes from his latest in Macleans titled, “Kangaroo Court is now in Session.”

“If anything I said above upsets you, please lodge a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission,” Kevin Baker advised his readers the other day. “You pay nothing. Filing is risk-free.” The National Post columnist had penned a gloriously insensitive opening paragraph suggesting that Ontario’s polygamous welfare deadbeats collecting individual dole handouts for each of their wives might like to corral their better halves (better eighths?) into a Muslim curling team. Mr. Baker proposed this because he’s decided he wants a slice of the human rights action, such as yours truly and Maclean’s have been enjoying these last three or four months. “I want to be a free-speech martyr, too. Give me some of that CHRC hate-speech love.” The big bucks are in getting your ass sued off for “flagrant Islamophobia.”

As Mr. Baker sees it, before I became the metaphorical Nelson Mandela metaphorically tasered into metaphorical submission by the metaphorical Gestapo of the sadly non-metaphorical Canadian Human Rights Commission, I was an amusing fellow prancing gaily through the flotsam and jetsam of the culture, twittering merrily on such weighty topics as Princess Margaret, Liza Minnelli and John Ralston Saul’s pre-viceregal fondness for the nude beaches of the Côte d’Azur. Ah, those were the days. As they say in Casablanca, I remember it as if it were yesterday. Liza wore black, John Ralston Saul wore, er, nothing. But I’ve put that flesh-coloured see-through thong away. When the CHRC thought police march out, I’ll wear it again, even if he won’t.

While the career benefits of free-speech martyrdom are perhaps not quite as lucrative as Kevin Baker assumes, I do take a quiet satisfaction in knowing that, publicity-wise, the last three months have been the worst in the entire existence of the “human rights” commissions. When news of the lawsuit against Maclean’s broke in early December, those who spoke up for the right of privately owned magazines to determine their own content were what one might call (Casablanca again) the usual suspects: George Jonas, Barbara Amiel, David Warren. No disrespect to my eminent comrades, but I had the vague feeling we might end up holding the big capacity-only free-speech rally in my Honda Civic. For a while, there was more interest abroad than at home, with the New York Post, the Australian, The Economist and the BBC taking up the story, while the Toronto Star et al. stayed silent. But then Liberal MP Keith Martin embraced the cause and proposed abolishing the grotesquely mismanaged Section 13 of the Human Rights Code, and the Canadian Association of Journalists and PEN Canada (i.e., all the CanCon lefties, and headed by nude playboy John Ralston Saul to boot) decided to sign on. The Globe And Mail eventually came out against the speech police, and so did CBC colossi Rex Murphy and Rick Mercer, and even Noam Chomsky. And by the time the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal was obliged (after a court motion filed by Maclean’s) to open its doors to the press and public, the presiding judge Athanios Hajdis uttered words rarely heard in the Canadian “human rights” biz: “Nice to see you all,” he offered the crowd. “More of an interest than there was before.” …

Bill Kristol says as good as McCain’s biography is, it’s not enough.

… But here’s something for the McCain campaign to remember: Democracies don’t always elect the man who has done the most for his country.

Consider our last four presidential elections. If voters had simply looked at the biographies of the major-party candidates, they would have chosen George H. W. Bush in 1992, Bob Dole in 1996, Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. Instead, they rejected four veterans who served in wartime (and who also had considerable experience in public life) for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who had lesser résumés, both civilian and military. …

However, Dean Barnett shows the difficulties the left has attacking McCain.

LAST THURSDAY, A controversy erupted in the blogosphere. Like most controversies that start in the blogosphere and die there as opposed to gaining a second and more meaningful life in the mainstream media, the entire affair was a tempest in a virtual teapot. But this incident was a particularly pregnant one, as it revealed the difficulties the left will have in developing a coherent attack against John McCain. It also highlighted Barack Obama’s most significant weakness in a match against Senator McCain. …

Clark Neily of the Institute for Justice demonstrates the need for eternal vigilance.

Imagine you were a state legislator and some folks asked you to pass a law making it a crime to give advice about paint colors and throw pillows without a license. And imagine they told you that the only people qualified to place large pieces of furniture in a room are those who have gotten a college degree in interior design, completed a two-year apprenticeship, and passed a national licensing exam. And by the way, it is criminally misleading for people who practice interior design to use that term without government permission.

You might stare at them incredulously for a moment, then look down at your calendar and say, “Oh, I get it — April Fool!” Right? Wrong.

These folks represent the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID), an industry group whose members have waged a 30-year, multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to legislate their competitors out of business. And those absurd restrictions on advice about paint selection, throw pillows and furniture placement represent the actual fruits of lobbying in places like Alabama, Nevada and Illinois, where ASID and its local affiliates have peddled their snake-oil mantra that “Every decision an interior designer makes affects life safety and quality of life.” …

American.Com reviews book on Middle Class Millionaires.

When people think of the “rich,” they might imagine billionaire plutocrats presiding over yacht fleets. Reality shows have made these folks appear remarkably prevalent. Lost in our obsession with the extremely rich, though, is another trend: over the past two decades, the ranks of the somewhat rich have also exploded. Indeed, the 8.4 million American households—some 7.6 percent of all U.S. households—with a net worth between $1 million and $10 million comprise one of the fastest growing demographics in the country.

“The rich are different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once said. But according to The Middle-Class Millionaire (Doubleday, 240 pp., $23.95), by Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff, these working-rich households are not so different from the rest of us, at least in their stated values. “Overwhelmingly, these millionaire households are headed by people raised in ordinary middle-class homes,” Prince and Schiff write. “Through their lifestyle choices and spending decisions, they wield influence in the overall economy in support of the same middle-class values and concerns they were raised with: security, health, self-betterment, family, and community.” Predominantly small business owners or principals in professional partnerships, these millionaires “have achieved the American dream the American way.” …